Transitioning to a hydrogen economy will require massive production of cheap, clean hydrogen gas for fuel and chemical feedstocks. New tools allow scientists to zoom in on a catalytic reaction that’s been a bottleneck in efforts to generate hydrogen from water more efficiently.

But a key step in that process, known as the oxygen evolution reaction or OER, has proven to be a bottleneck. Today it’s only about 75% efficient, and the precious metal catalysts used to accelerate the reaction, like platinum and iridium, are rare and expensive.

Now an international team led by scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has developed a suite of advanced tools to break through this bottleneck and improve other energy-related processes, such as finding ways to make lithium-ion batteries charge faster. The research team described their work in Nature today.

Working at Stanford, SLAC, DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Warwick University in the UK, they were able to zoom in on individual catalyst nanoparticles — shaped like tiny plates and about 200 times smaller than a red blood cell — and watch them accelerate the generation of oxygen inside custom-made electrochemical cells, including one that fits inside a drop of water.

They discovered that most of the catalytic activity took place on the edges of particles, and they were able to observe the chemical interactions between the particle and the surrounding electrolyte at a scale of billionths of a meter as they turned up the voltage to drive the reaction.

By combining their observations with prior computational work performed in collaboration with the SUNCAT Institute for Interface Science and Catalysis at SLAC and Stanford, they were able to identify a single step in the reaction that limits how fast it can proceed.

Story Source: Materials provided by DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Original written by Glennda Chui. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.